CSPC: Barbra Streisand Popularity Analysis
Academy Award, Emmy Award, Grammy Award, Golden Globe Award, Tony Award. At 28, Barbra Streisand had already won them all, the first female artist ever to do so. She is also the only winner ever to have won an Oscar in both a music and an acting category. Nearly half a century, she continues to be successful. Wow!
At the start of the 60s, Streisand had brief appearances in a pair of unsuccessful soundtracks / cast recordings. It is in 1963, when her proper debut LP was released, that she broke the main audience. The success never really left her. Through movies and albums, she was inevitable among the American entertainment industry for decades to come.
Her trajectory followed the one of the music industry. Her early albums were issued only in English-speaking countries. Each of the soundtracks Funny Girl (1968), The Way We Were (1974) and A Star Is Born (1976) opened new markets to her. In 1980, the Barry Gibb-powered Guilty transformed Streisand into a global superstar.
As she started her career 2 decades before Madonna, Whitney Houston, Celine Dion and Mariah Carey, she is rarely mentioned into female rankings. It doesn’t mean she has not sell enough to be featured on them!
As usual, I’ll be using the Commensurate Sales to Popularity Concept in order to relevantly gauge her results. This concept will not only bring you sales information for all Streisand‘s albums, physical and download singles, as well as audio and video streaming, but it will also determine their true popularity. If you are not yet familiar with the CSPC method, the next page explains it with a short video. I fully recommend watching the video before getting into the sales figures. Of course, if you are a regular visitor feel free to skip the video and get into the figures.
I know this will likely not be updated again. But according to a soundscan update from 2007 (provided by a user from UKmix) Higher Ground has sold additional 3 million copies in the US which are uncertified, and “Back to Broadway” another 1.7 million, also uncertified. ” A Love Like Ours”, another 1.1 million, other albuns also got plenty of uncertified sales in the US (I could have interpreted it all wrong though, feel free to correct me). “Guilty” also has certs in more countries than mentioned here (like in Brazil, before Pro Musica existed and reformulated the whole certs… Read more »
HI MDJ, can you tell us how many physical singles did she sell in USA?
She only has 7.5 millilon units certified on RIAA.
Considering her total physical single sales are of about 36 million and that according to the analysis 67% of her album sales comes from the US, I’d say we can calculate the percentage of about 67% of her total single sales, which the result is about 24.120.000. So she has probably sold from 20-25 million singles in the US.
Hi MJD, why didn’t you count Funny Girl (1964) and Nuts as Barbra albums but you did countThe Main Event?